How to Manage License Renewals in the QBR Budget?

How to Manage License Renewals in the QBR Budget?

This article covers how to manage licences or vendor contracts (e.g. Cisco Support Contract, Microsoft Subscription, etc.) in Propel Your MSP.
Two options are available depending on the way that the licenses are stored in your PSA.

License Stored as Agreements in the PSA

This is the simplest, but the rarest way. If the license is stored as a Agreement in the PSA, it will be automatically fetch by Propel Your MSP and calculated in the budget provided then you choose to display them in the budget:
1) Open the budget display options
 

Licenses Stored as "Fake Assets" in the PSA

Mapping

Even though they are intangible, licenses or vendor contracts are often stored as "fake assets" in the PSA. Thus, they can be imported as mapped assets in Propel. You will surely want to map them to a new Asset Category named "Licenses" or something similar. Propel Your MSP does not have a "License" support per say, but its Warranty Renewal Policy is very close. You will be able to budget a renewal every year.

End of Life vs Warranty Expiration

For these "fake license assets", we will only want to budget the Warranty Renewal, not the End of Life. But since the Warranty Renewals are only budgeted if the asset is within its calculated lifespan, we will need to make sure its lifespan is long enough to cover all the expected renewals. So, just like any other assets, you will need to specify a purchase date if you don't already have one imported from your PSA.
As for the End of Life, it depends on what the license is tied to. When tied to a single real assets (e.g. Server, Firewall, etc.), the End of Life should the same as the assets. When the license covers multiple assets, then its End of Life should be when you expect the license to stop being renewed.

Policy Definition

All licenses are going to be different, so we are going to put broad generic values in the Asset Category Policies and then override the field values on the individual license assets themselves. We suggest putting values that will stand-out (e.g. 1$)
1) Asset Category Policies


2) Asset Category Columns


Then, on each individual "license asset", you will override the "Warranty Annual Cost" and "Warranty Max Years Per Renewal" to reflect the reality of that license.



The budget will show the Warranty Renewals. If you want, you can edit the generated MS Word document to change "Warranty Renewal" for "License Renewal" for that Asset Category and.